DEMOCRACIA Y CONSTITUCIONALISMO

On April 27, 2011, Alabama was hit with sixty-two separate tornadoes

that killed over 240 people.69 _{Tuscaloosa, the home to the University of}

Alabama that contains over 30,000 students, including our law school, was struck by a single tornado that stayed on the ground for an unusually long distance. Within six minutes, it left a diagonal stripe of destruction just

under six miles long and—in certain places—a mile and a half wide.70 _The

university campus was spared any significant damage but our larger community was not. Fifty people died, including six university students,

and many others were injured.71 _{Twelve percent of the city was severely}

69 _{Mike Oliver, April 27’s Record Tally: 62 Tornadoes in Alabama, T}

HE BIRMINGHAM

NEWS (Aug. 4, 2011),

http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2011/08/april_27s_record_tally_62_torn.html; see Press Release, State of Ala. Emergency Mgmt. Agency, Fatality Update (July 28, 2011),

available at

http://ema.alabama.gov/filelibrary/PressRelease/NR_Fatality_update_July28.pdf.

70 _T

HE UNIV. OF ALA., OFFICE OF INST. RESEARCH & ASSESSMENT, CENSUS

ENROLLMENT REPORT (Fall 2010), available at

http://oira.ua.edu/d/webreports/enrollment2/Fall_2010/e11.html (stating that in the fall of 2010, there were 30,232 students enrolled at the University of Alabama); Tommy Stevenson, At Large: Tornado’s Aftermath Will Be Long-Lasting, TUSCALOOSA NEWS

(Aug. 7, 2011), http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20110807/NEWS/110809855 (“In only six minutes, the monster storm ripped a 5.9-mile diagonal swatch . . . through the heart of the city.”); see also State of the Climate: Tornadoes, NOAA NAT’L

CLIMATIC DATA CTR. (Apr. 2011), http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/tornadoes/2011/4 (stating that the tornado reached a width of 1.5 miles).

71 _{Laura Metcalf, Families Accept Degrees for Alabama Tornado Victims, T}

USCALOOSA

NEWS (Aug. 7, 2011),

http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20110807/NEWS/110809814 (stating that six university students died in the storm); Stephanie Taylor, City Raises April 27 Storm Death Toll to 50, TUSCALOOSA NEWS (Aug. 13, 2011), http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20110813/NEWS/110819903 (noting that earlier casualty calculations estimated Tuscaloosa’s tornado-related deaths at forty-seven although later information revealed the number to be fifty).

damaged or destroyed.72 _{This section documents my personal account of the}

tornado disaster, and the development of a law clinic response using models built on Katrina experiences.

Our area had been warned of the particularly dangerous conditions giving rise to the certainty of some level of severe weather and the possibility of deadly conditions. The university suspended classes in the afternoon, and fortunately many people took the warning seriously. Though this tragedy cost lives, homes, businesses, and altered many Alabamans’ lives permanently, most of us are able to describe close calls and count ourselves fortunate to have been missed.

The Law Clinics were able to benefit from some of the lessons learned through the landmark work done assisting those displaced by previous disasters. We received assistance from law clinicians in the South and Southeast, including, most significantly, from our Katrina-affected neighbors. Some of our clinicians and many of our faculty who had volunteered for related disaster projects of various types were living in Tuscaloosa when we participated in a clinical program to assist Katrina relocatees. The foundation from that project was critical as we began to consider how the law school clinics might respond to the disaster. Sitting in the law school with no power—and communicating by some available landlines and texting—we began to develop a plan. We hoped to create a legal assistance project based on the model that had been successful in the Katrina effort. Basically, the project trained law students in intake processes, placed them in shelters and disaster assistance centers, and then paired them with clinic lawyers or local volunteer attorneys to handle legal matters to conclusion. Assignments to local attorneys were handled by the county bar president.

72 _{Robin DeMonia, Alabama Tornadoes: Cites Turn Toward Ways to Rebuild, AL.C}

OM,

(July 27, 2011), http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2011/07/alabama_tornadoes_cities_turn.html.

There were several challenges to applying this process in the present situation in Alabama. First of all, the law student population was hit hard itself. Students and staff here somehow managed to account for every law student within the first several hours of the tornado, and no one was seriously injured. Even so, a total of fifty-six students—over 10 percent of

our law school population73_{—lost all of their belongings, and even some}

pets. Everyone knew someone close to them who was impacted. The student leadership quickly organized housing and communication links—to the extent available—and started sending out work parties twice a day. While the main campus simply cancelled the remainder of the semester, our students had not completed any graded work, and thus we could not eliminate final exams, which would be the only basis for their final assessment of their course performance. Projecting into the summer, we had no idea whether we would have the student staffing sufficient to meet the community’s legal needs if we went forward.

On April 29, I contacted the Alabama State Bar volunteer lawyer coordinator to share my thoughts and hopes of creating a legal assistance response to our disaster. I was told there were plans for a conference call that afternoon with the bar and the Young Lawyers Division, which has

disaster response as its mission.74 She gave me the time and call-in

information, and I went to our offices to review the plans from our post- Katrina efforts. There was a voicemail from Bob Kuehn, former director of our clinics and architect of our Katrina relocatee project, urging me to seize

73 _{See Quick Facts, U}

NIV. OF ALA. SCH. OF LAW, http://www.law.ua.edu/admissions/quick-facts/ (last visited Oct. 21, 2011).

74

In the late 1970s, the ABA Young Lawyers Division entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with FEMA to provide legal disaster services. See AMERICAN BAR ASS’N

YOUNG LAWYERS DIVISION, DISASTER LEGAL SERVICES TRAINING MANUAL 12-16 (2011),

http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/young_lawyers/fema_manu al_2011.authcheckdam.pdf.

the opportunity for the law clinics to rise to the occasion and offering to assist in any way possible. Within the hour, however, I received an e-mail and was “disinvited” to participate in the call, though I was assured that the law school would be an important part of the response as the bar and the Young Lawyers Division moved forward. The bar president was copied on the e-mail.

I called in despite the request, but held my tongue and primarily listened. The bar and Young Lawyers Division devised plans to set up a statewide hotline with a number, which would need to be publicized, and to hold clinics at various locations around the state beginning the week of May 23. I, however, felt strongly that we could be up and running in days—rather than wait—because our law school community was too eager to assist. When I shared these feelings, the bar and Young Lawyers Division suggested that I was overestimating the demand. Some participants stated, from past disaster experience, that legal needs would not develop until later in the post-disaster aftermath, and that service agencies, supplemented with assistance from volunteer lawyers on-site at day clinics, could handle much of the immediate need. I felt that I had failed to explain what the law school had to offer, and why our experiences made us well-suited to help direct the response.

Inspired by our students’ initiative in taking action rather than waiting for others, I determined that we would proceed in establishing our clinic. I had concerns that I was over-committing all of our clinic personnel, who had full-time responsibilities already, because volunteer lawyers had not yet made a commitment to our model. We were guessing both the demand and our capacity. At that point, several things began to move at once. We dug out older disaster relief manuals from Legal Services Alabama and students began to update the information. I worked to make contact with other service and volunteer organizations, both to find locations to set up our outreach and to inform these organizations that our services were available. With communications still spotty, it was difficult to even know the full

range of damage. In addition, Tuscaloosa’s American Red Cross and Salvation Army shelters were destroyed, so those traditional starting points were literally no longer on the map.75 _{Other staff members were developing}

procedures and processes for funneling intake interviews through assessment and case staffing, filing, and referrals—all the while fielding walk-in clients at the clinics.

On Tuesday, May 2, I contacted a local lawyer and long-time acquaintance to discuss the role of the local bar in the disaster relief efforts, still hoping for assistance in some significant capacity. After realizing that what he thought would be a one-day operation that Thursday was going to be an on-going clinic for as long as we believed it was needed, he paused, turned over to a blank page of his yellow legal pad and said, “Give me what you need from us to play your A game.” What followed was a frank assessment of what we both thought possible in terms of organization and commitment from both groups.

Our new partner then took back to the bar a proposal for an ongoing, clinic-led collaboration. His leadership within the county and state bar made this possible. Nevertheless, we both had to make compromises to meet the needs of the Alabama State Bar Volunteer Lawyers Program, the limitations on the time commitment from local attorneys, and the “best practices”— perhaps somewhat unrealistic—aspirations of myself and our other clinicians.

In the meantime, we put together a training workshop agenda, dividing both substantive law and skills areas among ourselves and calling in a

75 _{Amanda Simmons, Local Red Cross Chapter Moves Into New Office, T}

USCALOOSA

NEWS (June 1, 2011),

http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20110601/news/110539931 (stating that the Red Cross’s Tuscaloosa office was seriously damaged in April 27 tornado); Lydia Avant,

Loss of Shelter Complicates Tuscaloosa’s Homeless Situation, TUSCALOOSA NEWS (June 24, 2011), http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20110624/news/110629810 (stating that Tuscaloosa’s Salvation Army shelter was destroyed in the April 27th tornado).

volunteer young lawyer (and veteran of our first domestic violence clinic) to educate our students and us on basic FEMA processes. Seventy-four students and several staff from other areas within the law school attended.

Starting on May 5, we set up intakes at the law school clinics each morning and in three remote areas each afternoon, each staffed with at least two student volunteers, a clinic attorney, and a volunteer lawyer. From that day until June 1, we opened 205 tornado relief files, approximately the number our general civil clinic handles in a year. A little over fifty of those went to volunteer lawyers.

Within a few days of starting, it became clear to me that after our initial onslaught of clients, we would need a more controlled environment for rendering assistance. With the permission of the curriculum committee, I taught a first-time summer clinic session to continue the relief efforts. We continued to work the cases we had taken in and continued receiving new clients.

As we began our fall semester, we evaluated what to do next. Intakes were at a lull, intentionally, to give us time to regroup and begin the regular work of the fall clinics. We developed a plan to use Public Interest Institute law students and other law student volunteers to do door-to-door canvassing for unmet legal needs assessment. The SHN and the Mississippi Center for Justice assisted us in developing that plan and the appropriate survey instrument. Within a few weeks after school began, we traveled to visit with the Loyola Katrina Clinic faculty and staff to help us anticipate the future needs of our community and prepare to address them.

In hindsight, although each disaster is unique in substance and scope, I can see that there were difficult lessons we were learning that many of my colleagues could have taught us. Most importantly, there were resources of which I was not aware—and certainly could have used—and ideas and models such as those discussed in this article. There were offers of help, but difficulty in knowing what we could use. There were pre-disaster

relationships and collaborations to be built. But for the previous post- Katrina clinic here, we would have been starting more or less from scratch. I have learned that I share with many others a vision of a network response to future disasters. Law schools, and clinics in particular, play a vital or even a leadership role in partnering with our legal services providers and our colleagues at the state bar. I hope we continue to attempt to meet those challenges.